“The biggest improvements will be in increasing productivity of content creation. That focus is driven by the importance we see UGC having going forward. A professional developer at Valve will put up with a lot of pain that won't work if users themselves have to create content,” wrote Newell. He also said the company is hard at work building virtual reality support right into Source 2.

This leaked screenshot is supposedly Left 4 Dead 2 running on the Source 2 engine.

Speaking of virtual reality, someone asked when Valve started on virtual reality research (see here for more details). “[Michael] Abrash was thinking about it for a while, and started to get serious around 2 years ago. He thought that we'd reached the point where VR problems were getting tractable,” wrote Newell. Newell also claims that user input is the next big hurdle to overcome (it's hard to use a keyboard when you can't see).

What about cheaper Steam Machines built primarily for streaming games from another dedicated computer? Newell replied simply, “We're making some progress.”

Asked to clarify the target market for Steam Machines, Newell wrote, “We see Steam Machines (along with SteamOS and the Steam Controller) as a service update to Steam, porting the experience to a new room in the house. As we've been working on it, we've focused first on the customers who already love Steam and its games. They've told us they're tired of giving up all the stuff they love when they sit in the living room, so it seemed valuable to fix that.”

The current crop of Steam Machines (this Alienware box included) are built for power, not streaming.

On eSports, a field Valve has led with both Counter-Strike and Dota 2: “We still think we have a long way to go to get to the point where all of the different people that are contributing value to competitive play get everything out of it that they should. Feels like we are marking pretty good progress though.”